Open Source 3D Games

[D. Hageman]

On Tue, 9 Aug 2005, Jason Clinton wrote:
>
> It's not a matter of sloppy code but merely advances in hardware capabilities.
> The newer video cards feature pixel and vertex shaders and hardware transform
> and lighting -- all of the capabilities make for more realistic scenes;
> attaining the same result in software would require nothing short of a small
> supercomputering cluster. For all intents and purposes, the OSS drivers for
> ATI and NV cannot be used to play anything newer than Quake 3 Arena (a game
> that is now around 6 years old). That's a serious limitation. The proprietary
> drivers from ATI are half-asked, token implementations of their Windows
> equivalents. They have long-standing bugs which ATI seems rather
> un-interested in fixing.

Your comments about the OSS driver for ATI not being able to run anything 
newer then Quake 3 Arena is incorrect.  (I can't say the same about the 
OSS nVidia driver).  At any rate, you can google the mailing lists for 
more information.

Again, the r300 has made significant progress in the past two months.  I 
follow the development very closely and give feedback/help when I can - 
which isn't much these days due to time constraints. :-(

The biggest enemy of being able to produce quality OSS drivers is all the 
proprietary enhancement technology that is going into the new cards. 
Luckily not everyone lives in the United States, so there are ways around 
such things.

I guess I should add the disclaimer that I helped create the initial 
specification for the driconf tool, so I have ties to the project.  I also 
maintain the RPM packages for the tool.  I guess I might be wearing rose 
colored glasses.

-- 
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||  D. Hageman                    <dhageman at dracken.com>  ||
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